July 10, 2014

Art in Review

By ROBERTA SMITH

The three main shows at White Columns form a meditation on current painting tactics. In one small gallery, Patrick Berran very capably meets the demand for Minimalist paintings made by largely hands-off methods — in his case, layers of photocopy transfers dominated by a pattern that reads as leopard skin or moisture condensation, depending on its size. Nearby, Jennifer Nichols works with thin, bright acrylic, creating abstract tumults of transparent brushwork and, more recently, calmer arrangements of letterlike shapes. Both artists show promise, but so far they are operating within fashionable styles rather than making the work that only they can make.

Patrick Berran’s untitled work.

White Columns

In the large central gallery, Daniel Heidkamp makes paintings that seem fully his own, while doing more than his bit for a wryly self-conscious representational painting. (Other practitioners include Jonas Wood, Dana Schutz, Josephine Halvorson, Leidy Churchman, Aliza Nisenbaum.) He operates with an effortless, loose-limbed flair and even a bit of newness in an area that would seem pretty exhausted: plein-air landscape painting.

The examples here were made in Central Park, in open fields or among trees. Sometimes the artist’s wife and child figure in the scene. But the only components are mostly natural light falling on almost comically abbreviated natural forms, always with the Metropolitan Museum of Art — one of Western painting’s many meccas — glimpsed in the background.

Jennifer Nichols’s “Safe Feeling.”

White Columns

Mr. Heidkamp works in oil with visible speed that tolerates little reworking. You could say he forces Soutine’s excessive slurrings through the sieve of Matisse’s Olympian economy. His relaxed strokes also suggest attention to Sumi-e ink painting and perhaps the tendril-like calligraphies of Japanese poem cards. His surfaces run to extremes of thin washes and thick blobs, with the heaviest areas reserved for foliage.

He also heightens an awareness of paint as paint through distortion: Blades of grass and pine needles resemble giant combs, and cherry blossoms are big ellipses of pink. Their enlarged size suggests a painter’s eye zooming in on details. Mr. Heidkamp is something of a natural, but that shouldn’t be held against him. In this series, he quietly paints what he sees as he sees it. No fuss, no muss.

Correction: July 18, 2014

An art review last Friday about three shows at White Columns in Manhattan, including one of paintings by Daniel Heidkamp, misstated the given name of another practitioner of “wryly self-conscious representational painting” like Mr. Heidkamp’s. He is Jonas Wood, not Jonah.